Senate votes to eliminate offset in survivors’ benefits
Since 11-21-05
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Waspscpo@aol.com [mailto:Waspscpo@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 3:07 PM
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Subject: Senate votes to eliminate offset in survivors’ benefits
Senate
votes to eliminate offset in survivors’ benefits
Final approval would give extra $993 monthly
By
Rick Maze
NavyTimes staff writer
November 21, 2005
Over Pentagon objections, the Senate has approved a $9.3 billion, two-part plan
for improving military survivors’ benefits.It wasn’t even a close call. By a
93-5 vote, the Senate attached an amendment to the 2006 defense authorization
bill that increases survivors’ annuities when a service member dies on active
duty or in retirement from a service-connected cause. It also sets Oct. 1, 2005,
as the date by which military retirees would be limited to 30 years of paying
premiums in order to buy survivors’ coverage.
This is three years earlier than current law.Neither provision is included in
the House of Representatives’ version of the defense bill, which leaves the fate
of the proposals to negotiations between the House and Senate. Cost and the
Defense Department’s opposition are likely to be key issues in the discussion.
“It is nice to see senators stand up and do the right thing,” said Steve
Strobridge of the Military Officers Association of America, one of the many
military and veterans’ groups that have made survivors’ benefits their top
legislative issue for the year.Strobridge said the Defense Department’s
opposition would not mean much, as long as it was not accompanied by a veto
threat.
“We have heard the Pentagon oppose many things before that Congress has ended up
passing,” he said. “In fact, the Senate vote shows that Congress is our friend,
not the administration, regardless of the party in charge, when it comes to
personnel benefits.”Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chief sponsor of the amendment,
said the changes are aimed at correcting flaws in the survivors’ benefits system
and are especially important to pass at a time when U.S. troops are dying in
foreign wars.
The overwhelming vote came Nov. 8 after Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the Senate
Armed Services Committee chairman, suddenly dropped his opposition to the bill.
One day earlier, Warner said he would offer a substitute measure that would ask
for a study of survivors’ benefits instead of making changes.
He cited the cost, the fact that Congress had made several improvements in
benefits in recent years and Pentagon opposition as reasons to oppose Nelson’s
effort.His tune changed, though, under pressure from military and veterans’
organizations and after Warner found he would have trouble blocking Nelson’s
amendment. At that point, Warner announced.
About 55,000 affected
About 55,000 survivors, mostly widows, would be helped by a provision of
Nelson’s amendment that ends the practice of offsetting military survivors’
benefits by the amount received in dependency and indemnity compensation, a
survivors’ benefit paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The military benefit is known as SBP, and the VA benefit is known as DIC. The
result is a loss of $993 a month in benefits, which is the amount of the VA
benefit.Military associations used some of the same arguments they had made in
recent years to eliminate the similar offset in military retired pay for those
receiving veterans’ disability compensation. “SBP and DIC payments are paid for
different reasons,” said a Military Officers Association of America point paper.
SBP is a portion of the retired pay earned by the deceased member and payable to
the survivor. DIC is an annuity from the VA as compensation when military
service causes premature death, the point paper said.Nelson said the offset is
unfair. “I do not know of any other annuity program in the government or private
sector that is permitted to offset, terminate or reduce payments because of
disability payments a beneficiary may receive from another plan or program,” he
said.I
In a policy statement expressing opposition to the amendment, the Defense
Department said it is common in the private sector for a beneficiary to have to
choose only one benefit if more than one is available. Defense officials said it
also is possible for survivors of those who die on active duty to avoid the
offset by designating children, if there are dependent children, as the
beneficiaries of SBP, while the spouse would receive DIC.
The second part of Nelson’s amendment involved a decision by Congress in 1999 to
set a limit on how long military retirees must pay premiums. That year, Congress
decided 30 years was long enough for premiums to be paid. But, because of
funding constraints, the 30-year cutoff was delayed until Oct. 1, 2008, when
anyone who is 72 or older and has been retired from the military for 30 years or
more will no longer have SBP premiums deducted from retired pay.Nelson’s
amendment advanced the effective date by three years.
To wait until 2008 would mean some people would have paid premiums for up to 36
years under the SBP program that began in 1972, while others would pay only 30
years, which isn’t fair, Nelson said.
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Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)